MERCHANT Offers a Beautifully Troubling Mix - Shenandoah Press

"Religious hatred is part of the play; so is romantic comedy, and those two aspects of human experience don’t sit well together, which may be why Merchant isn’t as popular as plays that separate the dark and troubling from the trivial and frivolous. Most of us prefer theater that makes sense of the world to theater that leaves us wondering if the world makes sense, which is what ordinary life makes a lot of us wonder, after all, especially in the internet age...In a world where that kind of juxtaposition is part of ordinary life, the mixing in The Merchant of Venice rings completely true. At least in the hands of these people it does."